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Victory Day, will be a big day for Russian President Vladimir Putin. On
May 9, he will step out in Moscow in a new role. As the anniversaries of
the Second World War have approached, Putin has increasingly put
himself at the heart of his country’s wartime narrative of destruction,
death, and survival against the odds. He, personally, is the keeper of
the national memory, the chronicler of its history.

As Putin underscores
in a recent article for the Russian elite magazine, Russian Pioneer,
the war that Russians call the Great Fatherland War is literally his
father’s war. His father’s memories and his family’s represent those of
the entire Russian nation. Since his childhood, Putin has borne witness
to the Second World War. The Russian president goes to great lengths to
inform the Russian Pioneer readers that his family’s war stories are
facts. They have been thoroughly documented by others. In recounting
these stories, these facts, he is now passing them on to the next
generation.

In doing so he becomes the nation’s putative father, Otets.

Otets is the first capitalized word of Putin’s article in Russian
Pioneer. The magazine, which was created by members of his inner circle,
has helped rebrand Putin in the past. The article reads as
conversational version of the most vivid details of Putin’s father’s
tales from the front - fresh from Putin’s memories.

It conveys a number
of important personal and narrative points. Putin’s father, also called
Vladimir, was not a passive victim of the war. He volunteered for the
front. He fought back. He went on a mission behind enemy lines to
destroy bridges and railway lines - anything to defeat the enemy. Local
villagers betrayed him and his comrades to the "fascists." Almost
everyone was killed, but his father hid from German soldiers in a swamp
and escaped. Much later, Putin’s father was injured defending his home
city during the brutal Siege of Leningrad. He was saved by an old friend
and neighbor, and in turn Putin's father saved his wife, Putin's mother, from near death. Neither of
them could save their little son, Putin’s older brother, who was lost to
deprivation and disease, and buried in a mass grave.

Putin was his parents’ somewhat miraculous postwar son. Their stories
have shaped his personal and political perspectives. He now recasts them
for his own message to the Russian people. Several themes emerge. One
is the importance of loyalty, absolute loyalty. Another is betrayal as
the ultimate evil. Traitors must be punished. Yet another theme in
Putin’s retelling of his family story is reconciliation with Germans.

Beyond his personal history, Putin gleaned his knowledge of the war from
Soviet movies and books, from his studies of German language and
history, and from his 1980s KGB service in Dresden. Since the
rehabilitation of ordinary Germans and close friendship with East
Germany were political priorities in the USSR, the Soviets rewrote
history.

In postwar East Germany, fascists were quickly transformed into good
Communists. Responsibility for the atrocities of the Nazi regime was
laid on the capitalists, the Germans across the wall in the West. Putin
uses his parents’ stories in the same way. For instance, he stresses
that his father’s group behind enemy lines was led by an ethnic German
Soviet citizen, who presumably perished (although Putin does not
actually say). He recounts how his mother had counseled him not to
remember the German soldiers with hatred. They were, she reminded him,
ordinary people like us who were forced to the front to fight.

Therefore, Putin flees into the construction of a state where his KGB strengths shine: an autocratic regime in the tradition of the soviet union (and the GDR, by the way). Many people fall to his elaborate propaganda - partly also in Germany - as Putin addresses their craving for the one time in history when the world recognized Russia/SU as one of the two global superpowers (during the cold war).

Fiona Hill is right: once the war is over, Putin will be gone. It is thus the duty of the European Union to end this war asap.

I think the man in Kremlin understands the given situation much better than authors of this observation. The point is THE EUROPEAN BUREAUCRACY did have no idea of how close connected are the economies of Russia and Ukraine, was not aware of the fact that millions of Ukrainian people worked in Russia and earned there their money, have not noticed that there was no borders between Ukraine and Russia and all that goes on in Ukraine becomes reality in Russia too. YOUR EUROPEAN PRODUCTS could pass the space between our two countries without any customs control.
But NOBODY in Brussels asked whether Russia wants to see such a
flow of import wares on its territory. NOBODY imaged how painful for Ukraine
itself would be the loss of customers on the Russian side. Your EU - representatives conducted themselves like conceited selfish children, who get at once all they can get not taking in consideration how the reality could respond to their political games